the sourcerer: Early Spring.

Monday, August 24, 2015

Early Spring.

What greater delight is there than to behold the earth apparelled with plants, as with a robe of embroidered worke, set with Orient pearles and garnished with great diversitie of rare and costly jewels? - John Gerard, Herbal, 1597.

In her fantastic South African tome, Indigenous Plant Palettes, Marijke Honig talks about the exceptional diversity of bulbs, evergreen and deciduous - my own favourite. Jewellery for the garden, she says. I love her idea of planting them under a spiral of gravel.

I have been drawn to Lachenalias since I saw them blooming a year ago in the wild, on a mountain pass near Ceres. I had forgotten about them. Also known as the Cape Cowslip, Afrikaans people call them Laggienaggies - small laughs in the nighttime.

My friend the botanist has pointed out that this is in fact an orchid. Which is even more wonderful - as it was growing very close to snow!

We have some of the hybrids now - they are large, loud and flashy compared to their wild cousins - although I find them rather wonderful.

In the hotter front garden, the pincushion bushes are exploding with buds and flowers. They are airy and filled with light. In the golden hour at the end of the day, they become setting suns.

2 comments:

Rosie said...: Beautiful.

Will you forgive me if I point out that your third pic (the pink one) is an orchid, not a lachenalia? :); August 27, 2015 at 1:00 PM
the sourcerer said...: AAAh, thank you! I was a bit uncertain about the leaves.... X; August 27, 2015 at 1:11 PM

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You could tend a garden at night, only at night, pouring dark water onto leaves, and into the earth, like pouring midnight onto midnight. You could hold your soil-stained hands up to the moon. The stars would gleam on the bottom of the shovel. It would smell the same as a daytime garden - it would smell green, violet, red, white. But come back, in daylight. Come back, to see the colours without closing your eyes.
- Sean Michaels. Accompaniment to the song "Immune" by LOW. Said the Gramophone

Nothing is original. Steal from anywhere that resonates with inspiration or fuels your imagination. Devour old films, new films, music, books, paintings, photographs, poems, dreams, random conversations, architecture, bridges, street signs, trees, clouds, bodies of water, light and shadows. Select only things to steal from that speak directly to your soul. If you do this, your work (and theft) will be authentic. Authenticity is invaluable; originality is non-existent. And don't bother concealing your thievery - celebrate it if you feel like it. In any case, always remember what Jean-Luc Godard said: "It's not where you take things from - it's where you take them to."
Jim Jarmusch (1953- )

You got very hungry when you did not eat enough in Paris because all the bakery shops had such good things in the windows and people ate outside at tables on the sidewalk so that you saw and smelled the food. When you had given up journalism and were writing nothing that anyone in America would buy, explaining at home that you were lunching out with someone, the best place to go was the Luxembourg gardens where you smelled and saw nothing to eat all the way from the Place de l'Observatoire to the rue de Vaugirard. There you could always go into the Luxembourg museum and all the paintings were sharpened and clearer and more beautiful if you were belly-empty, hollow-hungry. I learned to understand Cézanne much better and to see truly how he made landscapes when I was hungry. I used to wonder if he were hungry too when he painted; but I thought possibly it was only that he had forgotten to eat. It was one of those unsound but illuminating thoughts you have when you have been sleepless or hungry. Later I thought that Cézanne was probably hungry in a different way.
Ernest Hemingway (1899-1961) - from A Moveable Feast.